Chongqing The Ring Garden City

Chongqing, China

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Chongqing The Ring Garden City

Chongqing, China

Firm

PH Alpha Design

Type

Commercial › Retail Shopping Mall

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2025

SIZE

100,000 sqft - 300,000 sqft

In the design of Chongqing The Ring, PHA pioneered the integration of natural ecology into interior commercial spaces, achieving a deep fusion of nature, park, and retail systems. This approach established the project as a benchmark city-scale commercial destination. Following the success of The Ring, Chongqing’s second “Ring” series development—The Ring Garden City—designed by PHA and jointly developed by Hongkong Land and China Merchants Shekou, officially opened in September 2025.
PHA continues the “ecology and diversity” ethos of the Ring series while further advancing the spatial evolution of eco-oriented retail in response to new market conditions. With the continuity of indoor and outdoor space as the core strategy, the project integrates an open-air pedestrian district beyond the enclosed mall. Through the sequential connection of entrance waterfalls, public atria, interior retail circulation, and the “You Lane” street district, a three-dimensional promenade is formed—ascendable and looped—enhancing spatial attraction. Within this continuous spatial narrative, retail, leisure, social activity, and urban landscape interweave to create an open, relaxed, and highly identifiable mixed-use commercial environment.

Urban Context and Site Response
Chongqing is a quintessential mountainous and forested city, where dramatic topography shapes a multi-layered urban form with varied elevations. This characteristic profoundly influences the organization of public space and architecture.
The Ring Garden City is located in the core area of the eastern zone of Central Park, Yubei District, directly adjacent to Asia’s largest urban central park and benefiting from exceptional ecological and landscape resources. The surrounding area integrates residential, educational, and office functions and is connected to Metro Lines 9 and 10, forming a high-intensity urban lifestyle node.
The project comprises three plots arranged laterally, with elevation differences in both east–west and north–south directions. The key design challenge was to establish a continuous, efficient, and engaging commercial spatial system while respecting the natural terrain.
Drawing inspiration from Chongqing’s distinctive mountainous character, the design responds to site elevation changes by creating layered spatial compositions. This approach breaks down the perceived mass of the large footprint into a natural architectural expression. Leveraging topographical differences, floor levels transition continuously in multiple directions, allowing above- and below-ground spaces to interweave. Along key street interfaces, building cantilevers generate semi-indoor street conditions that enrich pedestrian experience.

Multi-Level Ground Conditions and Rooftop District
From the outset, the design established a strategy to connect ground level, mall roofs, and street networks. At the planning scale, ground, sunken, elevated, and rooftop spaces are organized as a continuous system, enabling commercial circulation to extend naturally across multiple elevations and creating an open, accessible retail environment.
The project consists of Blocks A, B, and C, together with the outdoor “You Lane” street district. These components are unified through three-dimensional bridges and rooftop streets into a cohesive whole. Facing Central Park, the development adopts a lower-density, finer-grain architectural form to reduce visual impact on the park while drawing landscape views into the building, extending the urban scenery and supporting public activities.
The “You Lane” street district spans a vertical height difference of 45 meters from ground to roof, with an average width of approximately 22 meters and a total length exceeding 300 meters. A sequence of plazas, terraced spaces, viewing platforms, and water features creates a scenographic, rhythm-rich promenade. This non-linear, walkable spatial organization fosters a relaxed atmosphere. Strolling, pausing, and leisure consumption on the rooftop streets—while overlooking Central Park and the city skyline—has become one of the project’s most distinctive and popular spatial experiences.

Architectural Form and Facade Design
Inspired by the concept of “layered mountain rocks,” the design abstracts local landforms and the landscape characteristics of Central Park, translating elements such as mountains, stone, trees, clouds, and water into architectural massing and spatial order.
Through interlocking and staggered volumes, large-scale commercial massing is visually decomposed to create spatial richness. The façade employs glass in combination with aluminum panels, stone-textured bricks, and coatings, generating a material language defined by contrasts of solid and void and layered depth. At night, the integrated media façade system further enhances architectural identity, establishing the project as a prominent urban interface within the Central Park district.

Signature Space: “Wonder Tree”
At the heart of the project lies its most iconic interior atrium, featuring the “Wonder Tree”—a 20-meter-tall installation spanning four levels. Conceived as a parallel universe to the “Sunlit Forest” of Ring Shopping Park, the World Tree presents a striking mechanical-punk forest, integrating themes of symbiosis, life exploration, and interactive technology. Beyond a visual centerpiece, it functions as a vertical public space that connects floors and activates circulation.
The design reserves generous scale and structural flexibility within the atrium, providing maximum freedom for the creation of this “super scene.” The expansive glass façade and the interior World Tree installation reinforce each other, projecting the 4,000-square-meter super landscape onto the urban frontage and delivering a powerful visual impact. This landmark not only stimulates organic social sharing and exponential footfall but also elevates the project’s—and the city’s—collective memory.

Conclusion
Rooted in Chongqing’s distinctive mountainous terrain and centered on park landscape value, the project organically integrates retail, social interaction, leisure, and nature, blurring the boundaries between architecture and city, park and commerce. Here, retail is no longer a closed container for consumption, but an open stage for urban life. With an open, three-dimensional, and adaptable spatial framework, The Ring Garden City injects new vitality into the Chongqing Central Park district.
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Project Information
• Location: Chongqing, China
• Site Area: 55,044 sqm
• GFA: 170,000 sqm
• Client: Hongkong Land & China Merchants Shekou
• Opening Date: September 26, 2025
• Architectural Design: PH Alpha Design Limited
• Lead Designers: Ziping Xu, Frank Xu, Jonathan Alotto, Yi Tong
• Photography: CreatAR